ANG LEE [Taiwan Director]

Ang Lee (born October 23, 1954) is an Academy Award-winning film director from Taiwan.Many of Ang Lee's films have focused on the interactions between modernity and tradition. Some of his films have also had a light-hearted comic tone which marks a break from the tragic historical realism which characterized Taiwanese filmmaking after the end of the martial law period in 1987. Lee's films also tend to draw on deep secrets and internal torment that come to the surface, such as in the gay-themed films The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Brokeback Mountain (2005) [won the Academy Award for Best Director], the martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) (nominated for Academy Award for Best Director), and the comic book adaptation Hulk (2003).

Ang Lee was born in the town of Chaochou in Pingtung, a southern agricultural county in Taiwan. He grew up in a household that put heavy emphasis on education and the Chinese classics. Both of Ang Lee's parents moved to Taiwan from mainland China following the Nationalists' defeat in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Lee's father, a native of Jiangxi Province in southern China, imbued his children with studying Chinese culture and art, especially calligraphy.

Lee studied in the prestigious National Tainan First Senior High School where his father was a former principal. He was expected to pass the annual Joint College/University Entrance Examination, the only route to a university education in Taiwan. But after failing the Exam twice, to the disappointment of his father, he entered a three-year college, National Arts School and graduated in 1975. After finishing the mandatory military service, Lee went to the U.S. in 1979 to study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he completed his bachelor's in theater in 1980. During graduate school, Lee finished a 16 mm short film, Shades of the Lake (1982), which won the Best Drama Award in Short Film in Taiwan. Lee remained unemployed for six years. During this time, he was a full-time househusband, while his wife Jane Lin, a molecular biologist, was the sole breadwinner for the family of four. This arrangement, an embarrassment in Chinese culture, put enormous pressure on the couple, but with Lin’s support and understanding, Lee did not abandon his career in films but continued to generate new ideas from movies and performances. He also wrote several screenplays during this time.In 1990, Lee submitted two screenplays, Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet, to a competition sponsored by Taiwan’s Government Information Office, and they came in first and second respectively. Hsu, a first-time producer, invited Lee to direct Pushing Hands, a full-length feature that debuted in 1991.Pushing Hands (1992) was a success in Taiwan both among critics and at the box office. It received eight nominations in the Golden Horse Film Festival, Taiwan’s premier film festival. Inspired by the success, Hsu collaborated with Lee in their second film, The Wedding Banquet (1993), which won the Golden Bear in the Berlin Film Festival and was nominated as the Best Foreign Language Film in both the Golden Globe and the Academy Awards. In all, this film collected eleven Taiwanese and international awards and made Lee a rising star.Lee's first two movies were based on stories of Taiwanese Americans, and both were filmed in the US. In 1995, Hsu invited Lee to return to Taiwan to make Eat Drink Man Woman, a film that depicts traditional values, modern relationships, and family conflicts in Taipei. The film was once again a box office hit and was critically acclaimed. For a second consecutive year, Lee’s film received the Best Foreign Language Film nomination in both the Golden Globe and Academy Awards, as well as in the British Academy Award. Lee's dramas opened the door to Hollywood for him. In 1995, Lee directed Columbia TriStar's British classical Sense and Sensibility. The switching from Taiwanese to British films did not stop Lee from claiming awards in the film festivals. Sense and Sensibility made Lee a second time director of the Golden Bear film in the Berlin Film Festival, and it was nominated in 7 Academy Awards and won the Best Adapted Screenplay by Emma Thompson. It also won the Golden Glob Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama. Excited about the opportunity to fulfill his childhood dream, Lee assembled a team from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). The film was a surprising success worldwide. With Chinese dialogue and English subtitles, the film became the highest grossing foreign film in many countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Director at the Academy Awards. It ended up winning Best Foreign Language Film and three technical awards.In 2003, Lee returned to Hollywood to direct Hulk, his first big-budget movie. Even though the film was based on a comic book superhero and was filled with obligatory CGI special effects, Lee used the genre to tell the tortuous story between a father and his son. The movie was a disappointment amongst both critics and audiences. After the setback, Lee considered retiring early, but his father encouraged him to continue making movies.Lee decided to take on a small-budget, low-profile independent film based on Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-finalist short story, Brokeback Mountain. The film showcased Lee's skills in probing depths of the human heart.After Brokeback Mountain, Lee returned to a Chinese topic. His next film is Lust, Caution, which is adapted from a short novel by a Chinese author Eileen Chang. The story was written in 1950 loosely based on an actual event that took place in 1939-1940 in Japanese occupied-Shanghai, China, during World War II.

Lee lives in Larchmont, New York.

Lee's film Brokeback Mountain (2005) won the Golden Lion (best film) award at the Venice International Film Festival and was named 2005's best film by the film critics.It also won best picture at the 2005 Broadcast Film Critics Association, Directors Guild of America, Writers Guild of America (Adapted Screenplay), Producers Guild of America and the Independent Spirit Awards as well as the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture — Drama, with Lee winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Director. Brokeback also won Best Film and Best Director at the 2006 British Academy Awards (BAFTA). In January 2006, Brokeback scored a leading eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director, which Lee won. He is the first Asian director to do so.

In 2007, Lee's film Lust, Caution earned him a second Golden Lion, making him one of only two directors to have ever won Venice's most prestigious award twice.